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Queue management firm Tensator announced it has helped long-standing British tea brand Tetley cause a stir in Kuwait’s supermarkets, by using Virtual Assistants to promote tea.

Tensator’s Virtual Assistant Ultra model has been installed at 10 Co-op stores across the country, and brings the mechanism of Tetley’s drawstring teabags to life with a live demonstration.

Currently in stores in Jahra, Defence, Madina Saad, Sulaibhikhat, Adan, Qusoor, Rumaithiya, Rikka, Fahaheel, and Salmiya, the 50x50cm unit is designed for retail shop floor promotions, and to create a buzz around a particular product.

According to the company, The Virtual Assistant Ultra is a next-generation digital signage solution that uses cutting-edge technology to project an image and create the illusion of a real person. This gives it the unique ability to bring messages to life and attract more sales. Its integrated Bose sound system and ability to showcase Tetley’s range of drawstring teabags in detail means that the benefits of the product are made much clearer to crowds of shoppers than would otherwise be possible without devoting extra staff.

Tetley’s parent company, Indian tea giant Tata Global Beverages, said it was attracted to the Tensator Virtual Assistant Ultra because of its ability to interact and create a wow factor in store.

“This is a first for supermarkets in Kuwait and the wider Middle East, and the Virtual Assistant experience is very life-like and unique,” said Danny Finney, Commercial Director for Tata Global Beverages in the Middle East. “As a brand, Tetley has a long history of innovation so we think it’s a perfect fit to use state of the art technology to demonstrate our revolutionary Drawstring teabag.

With a simple trick, the humble spud can be made into a battery, so could potato powered homes catch on?

Mashed, boiled, baked or fried? You probably have a preference for your potatoes. Haim Rabinowitch, however, likes his spuds “hacked”.

For the past few years, researcher Rabinowitch and colleagues have been pushing the idea of “potato power” to deliver energy to people cut off from electricity grids. Hook up a spud to a couple of cheap metal plates, wires and LED bulbs, they argue, and it could provide lighting to remote towns and villages around the world.

They’ve also discovered a simple but ingenious trick to make potatoes particularly good at producing energy. “A single potato can power enough LED lamps for a room for 40 days,” claims Rabinowitch, who is based at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The idea may seem absurd, yet it is rooted in sound science. Still, Rabinowitch and his team have discovered that actually launching potato power in the real world is much more complex than it first appears. While Rabinowitch and team have found a way to make potatoes produce more power than usual, the basic principles are taught in high school science classes, to demonstrate how batteries work.

To make a battery from organic material, all you need is two metals – an anode, which is the negative electrode, such as zinc, and a cathode, the positively charged electrode, such as copper. The acid inside the potato forms a chemical reaction with the zinc and copper, and when the electrons flow from one material to another, energy is released.

This was discovered by Luigi Galvani in 1780 when he connected two metals to the legs of a frog, causing its muscles to twitch. But you can put many materials between these two electrodes to get the same effect. Alexander Volta, around the time of Galvani, used saltwater-soaked paper. Others have made “earth batteries” using two metal plates and a pile of dirt, or a bucket of water.

Super spuds

Potatoes are often the preferred vegetable of choice for teaching high school science students these principles. Yet to the surprise of Rabinowitch, no one had scientifically studied spuds as an energy source. So in 2010, he decided to give it a try, along with PhD student Alex Goldberg, and Boris Rubinsky of the University of California, Berkeley.

“We looked at 20 different types of potatoes,” explains Goldberg, “and we looked at their internal resistance, which allows us to understand how much energy was lost by heat.”

They found that by simply boiling the potatoes for eight minutes, it broke down the organic tissues inside the potatoes, reducing resistance and allowing for freer movement of electrons– thus producing more energy. They also increased the energy output by slicing the potato into four or five pieces, each sandwiched by a copper and zinc plate, to make a series. “We found we could improve the output 10 times, which made it interesting economically, because the cost of energy drops down,” says Goldberg.

“It’s low voltage energy,” says Rabinowitch, “but enough to construct a battery that could charge mobile phones or laptops in places where there is no grid, no power connection.”

Their cost analyses suggested that a single boiled potato battery with zinc and copper electrodes generates portable energy at an estimated $9 per kilowatt hour, which is 50-fold cheaper than a typical 1.5 volt AA alkaline cell or D cell battery, which can cost $49–84 per kilowatt hour. It’s also an estimated six times cheaper than standard kerosene lamps used in the developing world.

Which raises an important question – why isn’t the potato battery already a roaring success?

In 2010, the world produced a staggering 324,181,889 tonnes of potatoes. They are the world’s number one non-grain crop, in 130 countries, and a hefty source of starch for billions around the world. They are cheap, store easily, and last for a long time.With 1.2 billion people in the world lacking access to electricity, a simple potato could be the answer– or so the researchers thought. “We thought organisations would be interested,” says Rabinowitch. “We thought politicians in India would give them out with their names inscribed on them. They cost less than a dollar.”Yet three years on since their experiment, why haven’t governments, companies or organisations embraced potato batteries? “The simple answer is they don’t even know about it,” reasons Rabinowitch. But it may be more complicated than that.

First, there’s the issue of using a food for energy. Olivier Dubois, senior natural resources officer at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), says that using food for energy – like sugar cane for biofuels – must avoid depleting food stocks and competing with farmers.“You first need to look at: are there enough potatoes to eat? Then, are we not competing with farmers making income from selling potatoes?” he explains. “So if eating potatoes is covered, selling potatoes is covered, and there’s some potatoes left, then yes, it can work”In a country like Kenya, the potato is the second most important food for families after maize. Smallholder farmers produced around 10 million tonnes of potatoes this year, yet around 10-20% were lost in post-harvest waste due to lack of access to markets, poor storage conditions, and other issues, according to Elmar Schulte–Geldermann, potato science leader for sub–Saharan Africa at the International Potato Center in Nairobi, Kenya. The potatoes that don’t make it to the market could easily be turned into batteries.

Pithy answer

Yet in Sri Lanka, for instance, the locally available potatoes are rare and expensive. So a team of scientists at the University of Kelaniya recently decided to try the experiment with something more widely available, and free – plantain piths (stems).

Physicist KD Jayasuriya and his team found that the boiling technique produced a similar efficiency increase for plantains – and the best battery performance was obtained by chopping the plantain pith after boiling.

With the boiled piths, they found they could power a single LED for more than 500 hours, provided it is prevented from drying out. “I think the potato has slightly better current, but the plantain pith is free, it’s something we throw away,” says Jayasuriya.

Despite all this, some are sceptical of the feasibility of potato power. “In reality, the potato battery is essentially like a regular battery you’d buy at the store,” says Derek Lovley at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “It’s just using a different matrix.” While the potato helps to prevent energy being lost to heat, it is not the source of the energy – that’s actually extracted via the corrosion of the zinc. “It’s sacrificial – the metal is degrading over time,” says Lovley. This means you’d have to replace the zinc – and of course the potato or plantain pith – over time.

Still, zinc is quite cheap in most developing countries. And Jayasuriya argues that it could still be more cost effective than a kerosene lamp. A zinc electrode that lasts about five months would cost about the same as a litre of kerosene, which fuels the average family home in Sri Lanka for two days. You could also use other electrodes, like magnesium or iron.But potato advocates must surmount another problem before their idea catches on: consumer perception of potatoes. Compared with modern technologies like solar power, potatoes are perhaps less desirable as an energy source.

Gaurav Manchanda, founder of One Degree Solar, which sells micro-solar home systems in Kenya, says people buy their products for more reasons than efficiency and price. “These are all consumers at the end of the day. They need to see the value in it, not only in terms of performance, but status,” he explains. Basically, some people might not want to show off their potato battery to impress a neighbor.

Still, it cannot be denied that the potato battery idea works, and it appears cheap. Advocates of potato power will no doubt continue to keep chipping away.

To some, aquaponics is the latest fad. To others, it is the future of urban agriculture.

Aquaponics is a blend of aquaculture — fish farming — and hydroponics, growing plants without soil in water. The idea is to grow fish in a tub or pool, using the nutrient-rich fish waste to fertilize vegetables and herbs grown hydroponically.

It is a nearly closed-loop system. The water from the fish tank, containing all the nutrients needed for plant growth, is pumped or diverted by gravity to the hydroponically grown plants. The plants filter ammonia and other fish waste products out of the water, which is then recirculated back to the fish. The only inputs required are food for the fish and small amounts of water to replenish what is lost through evaporation from the tank and transpiration through plant leaves.

Aquaponics systems provide two essential elements of the human diet — protein and vegetables — and can be run on a small scale for a backyard garden or a larger scale to produce food for a group of restaurants or even a whole community. It is becoming popular across the country as a way of providing locally grown, sustainably produced food. In fact, aquaponics systems use less than one-tenth the water of most soil-based growing systems. They become even more sustainable when paired with renewable energy sources such as solar- or geothermal-powered pumps and heaters.

Although both aquaculture and hydroponics systems are efficient and conserve natural resources by preventing overfishing of our oceans and using less space than traditional agriculture, aquaponics is even more sustainable than either aquaculture or hydroponics alone.

Symbiotic relationship – Aquaculture, similar to other intensive animal operations, has the problem of how to deal with the animal waste without harming the environment. Similarly, hydroponics systems require inputs of expensive commercial liquid fertilizers, and the water must be disposed of periodically and replaced to avoid a toxic buildup of salts from the fertilizers. The ammonia-rich fish waste that is toxic to fish in aquaculture becomes liquid gold for aquaponics growers, as it is taken up by plant roots to provide nutrients for the growing plants.

Many types of aquaponics systems exist, ranging from indoor systems with an aquarium and simple grow bed to outdoor systems protected by a greenhouse or hoop house and powered by the sun. Plants in these systems can grow with their roots directly in water and the plants held upright by a floating mat.

However, the easiest method is to grow plants in a coarse soilless medium, such as gravel or expanded shale, flooded periodically with water from the fish tank. This simple ebb-and-flood system can also become a home for composting worms, which, along with the beneficial bacteria that build up naturally in the system, break down the ammonia waste to a form plants prefer.

The most common plants grown in aquaponics systems include salad greens, tomatoes, peppers and strawberries.

But almost any type of plant can be grown, including herbs, root vegetables, melons, potatoes and even small trees.

The only plants that are difficult are those that require a very acidic medium such as blueberries, or a very alkaline medium such as rosemary.

Plants are usually started from seed, broadcast over the growing medium (small seeds) or germinated ahead in rockwool or peat plugs (larger seeds). You can even stick cuttings from existing plants in an aquaponics system if you cover them with plastic and provide shade until they form roots.

Heidi Kratsch is the area horticulture specialist with the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension. She can be reached atkratschh@unce.unr.edu or 775-748-4848.

Three women farmers were recently felicitated for their scientific approach and acumen.

Laxmi Lokur is 38 and single. “I have no time for marriage,” she says, before moving on to her favourite subject, agriculture, and all the projects she has undertaken to attract youngsters to the field, quite literally.

Laxmi is from Karnataka’s Belgaum district and lives on her 22-acre farm. With her team of eight, which includes three women, she grows organic vegetables and fruits. Her focus is more on sowing, planning marketing networks and utilisation of the by-products of vegetables. She also runs a dairy.

Like Laxmi, Teilang Rani, 30, is also passionate about the land. Although a teacher by profession, she spends about four hours a day in the fields. Her family owns 11 acres in the village of Umden Arka, in Meghalaya’s Ri Bhoi district, on which she and her grandparents grow vegetables and paddy. The family cultivates bamboo on an additional acre. About a decade ago, Teilang began fermenting tender bamboo shoots to make curries, soup, pickles and chutneys, and has now developed this as a business model.

Bhagwati Devi from Sikar, in Rajasthan, has invented a way to protect crops from termites by planting a variety of wood, locally known as safedi ki lakdi.

Their love for agriculture and acumen for innovation recently fetched Laxmi, Teilang and Bhagwati national recognition. They were the only women felicitated alongside 28 other “farmer scientists” from 18 States by the Centre for International Trade in Agriculture and Agro-based Industries (CITA) and the Department of Agriculture, Rajasthan. The Union Agriculture Minister and Rajasthan’s Chief Minister were also present at the function held in Jaipur, where the women were honoured for their innovative practices and scientific research to enhance crop yields, improve seed varieties and scale up soil productivity.

For Teilang, this was only the second time she had ever ventured out of Meghalaya. Elaborating on her award-winning business model, she says, “We select 45-60-cm-long tender bamboo shoots for fermentation. These are stunted shoots, which are not likely to produce good quality bamboo for use in construction. The shoots are sliced and immersed in large jugs of water after their sheaths have been removed. They are kept like this for about a month when they ferment. We use this bamboo as pickle, add it to fish or pork curry and even soups.” Teilang has taken her bamboo shoot pickle to village exhibitions and other marketplaces, and makes about Rs 10,000 a year from her produce.

Laxmi, on the other hand, gave up a flourishing bag manufacturing business in Mumbai to return to farming in her native village of Udikeri, nine years ago. Laxmi’s family owned about seven acres when she first put her hands to the plough. “For one year, my father came to the fields with me to guide me. I started with a nursery, but we were unable to meet our day-to-day expenses. Then I bought a buffalo to sell milk. The next year, I bought four more. In 2005, I took a loan of Rs 6.4 lakh from the State Bank of India to procure 18 Murrah buffaloes from Haryana for dairy production. Simultaneously we worked on developing vermicompost. By 2006, we were selling vermicompost. Today we grow vegetables, which we supply to Bangalore and neighbouring districts. I have now developed my own marketing network.”

When she realised that seeds were getting too expensive, she started collecting local seeds. Three years on, she has been able to collect 22 varieties of local vegetable seeds. She now owns 19 acres, and has taken another three acres on lease. Once a month, she even train farmers in innovative farming, in making vermicompost the natural way and on using organic hybrids to increase harvests.

She now plans to register a non-governmental organisation and has already decided on the name: Prerna (inspiration). Apt indeed, seeing how she has inspired at least 20 young people over the last nine years to give up business activities and take up agriculture.

Laxmi, Teilang and Bhagwati are women with their hands on the plough and an instinct for the land. In a predominantly agrarian country like India, they can help transform the landscape.

Joule Unlimited Technologies Inc. won the Silver in this year’s Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Awards for developing a more efficient technique for producing biofuel.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based company has created genetically engineered micro-organisms that secrete ethanol, diesel fuel and other hydrocarbons from water, sunlight and carbon dioxide. The use of these patented organisms eliminates some of the costly processing steps needed to turn plants into motor fuel.

“The technology has the exciting potential to significantly transform the economics of the biofuel industry,” says Kenny Tang, founder and chief executive of Oxbridge Weather Capital and an Innovation Awards judge.

Traditional biofuels derived from farm products such as corn and sugar cane have come under fire for using up resources that otherwise could be used for food. So researchers began looking to other materials—plants such as switchgrass or jatropha and micro-organisms such as algae—to produce the next generation of biofuels.

Joule took a different path. It uses genetically modified strains of cyanobacteria, which are water-based organisms that make their food through photosynthesis. The organisms, created by a scientific team led by Joule co-founder Noubar Afeyan, can be tweaked to produce different fuels—one form can produce simple ethanol, while another generates more-complex diesel molecules.

While regular algae has to be harvested and processed to squeeze out hydrocarbons, Joule’s cyanobacteria release fuels continuously.

Inside the Solar-converter tanks, micro-organisms secrete fuels

Joule’s other innovation is its SolarConverter bioreactor, a system of closed tanks that look like solar panels, where the organisms grow and release their fuels. Designed to maximize the amount of sunlight that reaches each organism, the tanks mix the cyanobacteria colonies with water laced with micronutrients and piped-in carbon dioxide. Liquid fuels are separated from the water and piped to nearby tanks for storage.

Joule says its systems could produce 15,000 gallons of diesel and 25,000 gallons of ethanol a year on an acre of land, for as little as $20 per barrel-equivalent of diesel and 60 cents per gallon of ethanol.

Since 2010, the company has been operating a pilot plant in Leander, Texas, where it is testing ethanol production. It plans to break ground this month on a larger-scale demonstration facility in New Mexico, with a goal of beginning commercial production by late 2012 or early 2013.

“Scalability and efficiency are open questions, but the concept is great,” says Darlene J.S. Solomon, chief technology officer at Agilent Technologies Inc. and an Innovation Awards judge.

Mobile telephony and information technology are bringing a quiet revolution to rural India. Government organizations, NGOs and private enterprises are using these to help empower farmers with information on crop prices and better farming practices. Nokia’s Life Tools provides real-time, localized information on crops and weather to farmers. NGO Digital Green has taken IT to villages to improve farming methods. The central government’s National Internet Exchange of India is creating a digital platform that networks all the panchayats in India.

Nokia Life Tools is a simple SMS-based application that comes preloaded in 15 basic handsets. By keying in the PIN code, the software figures out the area the farmer resides in, and supplies him location-specific information in the local language of his choice. Knowledge desks in different parts of the country, manned by professionals, update the data continuously.

Launched in 2009, the project has been perfected using the results of surveys and pilot studies carried out by Nokia in villages of Maharashtra, Karnataka and UP. Following its success in India, Nokia has launched Life Tools in China, Indonesia and Nigeria.

The surveys showed that farmers lost out on bargaining power while selling their produce as they didn’t have accurate and reliable data. B V Natesh, head, emerging market services, Nokia India, said: “We found that there was enough data, but the farmer wasn’t getting them. So we supplied information on prevailing market prices and arrival of crops from the nearest mandis; tips and crop advisory from experts; pest management, latest techniques of crop cultivation; and agriculture news and weather.”

The desk for crop-related information is located in Bangalore. Nokia has tied up with 24 partners drawn from government, NGOs and the private sector. They comprise private players such as Syngenta, ITC e-Choupal, Coromandel International, EnableM & Pearson, government agencies such as Maharashtra State Agri Marketing Board, Rubber and Spices Board, and NGOs such as National Agro Foundation. There are also a set of translators who render data in English to languages specific to the region.

S Chand, member of the agri knowledge desk said: “The desk is administered and managed by more than 20 qualified and experienced professionals. We provide services in 530 districts and 4,500 mandis. The experts from the desk manage queries from farmers. We also send out advisory for more than 100 crops. The content for this service is prepared on the basis of inputs from Nokia’s knowledge partners.”

Health and Education

Nokia Life Tools has been extended to education and health-related information. The education module comprises background material based on classroom syllabi that serve as a guide for students.

Nokia has tied up with IGNOU (Indira Gandhi National Open University) for the Learn English course. This is a pilot project in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. It has been found that students who took assistance of Life Tools completed the course faster than those who did not. The health component of Life Tools, launched last month, includes information on hygiene, food, pregnancy and child care. During the monsoon season, for example, users get information related to cold waves, fever, water contamination etc. Nokia charges Rs 30 a month, or a rupee a day, for the Life Tools service.

Of, by & for farmers

Rikin Gandhi of NGO Digital Green, while he was with Microsoft Research in Bangalore, devised a solution to help farmers adopt better practices. Digital Green works with partners to create videos of agricultural techniques and information. “These videos that feature farmers are screened triggering discussion on various farming issues and practices. The data about the videos, such as their reach, feedback of viewers, etc are collated, analysed and used in future projects,” said Gandhi.

Some of the key principles on which the programme rests are participation of the farming community; a hardware and software technology platform for exchanging data in areas with limited electricity supply and internet connectivity; locally generated digital video database; and dissemination of professionally-vetted information among the farmers. Over the past two years, 1,500 videos have been made.

It has been found that video content motivates farmers to adopt relevant new techniques, especially when they find their peers benefiting from them. Currently the project runs in five states — Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar and Orissa.

ITC’s e-Choupal has village internet kiosks managed by farmers. It provides information in local languages on weather and market prices; scientific farming practices; risk management strategies etc. Customized, real-time information has been found to enhance the ability of farmers to take decisions on their own and align their farm output with market demand.

Digital panchayat

There are as many as two and a half lakh panchayats in India. Most of them are devoid of good governance systems and info-tech infrastructure. To address this huge digital divide, the Union government’s National Internet Exchange of India in collaboration with Digital Empowerment Foundation has launched a pilot programme to create 500 digital panchayats in 15 states.

Currently in its initial stages, some of the objectives of the Digital Panchayat project are to improve governance of panchayats with a two-way flow of information between authorities and people; create a database for the panchayat and promote the economy by panchayat tourism and e-commerce.

Cooper Tea Company and Third Street win IQ Innovation Award

The product being honored is the companies’ joint line of “Third Street – B. W. Cooper’s Organic Iced Brew Tea Concentrates.” The eco-friendly concentrates are packaged in quart bottles. When mixed with water, each bottle of tea concentrate makes two gallons of tea. This represents an 87 percent reduced level of packaging vs. the same amount of iced tea in 16.9 oz bottles or cans. The Iced Brew Tea Concentrates are all-natural, made from brewed tea leaves, USDA-certified organic. The product line was the most successful new specialty item in two Whole Foods Market regions last year.

“Given the level of entrepreneurship and innovation in the Boulder County natural products community, we consider this quite an honor,” said Colleen Norwine, Marketing Director, Cooper Tea Company.

Earlier this year the two companies announced their intention to merge, due largely to the successful partnership on this product line. Combined, the companies’ product portfolios include 52 SKUs that serve natural and conventional grocery markets and foodservice operations.

ABOUT COOPER TEA

Based in Louisville, Colorado, the Cooper Tea Company is known for its premium B.W. Cooper’s Iced Brew Tea concentrates, which are served nationally in foodservice operations. Cooper Tea developed the first USDA-certified organic bag-in-box iced tea.

ABOUT THIRD STREET

Third Street, a Boulder, Colorado-based company, developed the first organic and Fair Trade chai concentrates in 2001 and has been microbrewing for the retail and specialty coffee markets ever since.

Innovations play an important role in food production as well as in optimizing resource utilization by farmers. An innovation is an idea, practice or object that is perceived as new by an individual or others in a given system. The technologies/practices that are developed through research are innovations which may be new varieties of crops and plants, new breeds of livestock, new chemicals and medicines, new technique of doing things etc. Irrespective of time period the idea or practice was originally developed, when a person first becomes aware of it, it is an innovation to that person. Using something old in new ways or applying something new to successfully produce desired social and economic outcome is an innovation.

Apart from innovations and scientific package of practices developed and transferred from R&D institutes, innovations in the form of grassroot level technologies and methodologies developed by some of the innovative farmers and rural youth are benefiting widely to farmers and have also been accepted across the system. Such innovative technologies and methodologies are largely confined to some locations. Benefits accrued from such innovative ideas need to be widely shared across the country. And the scientific talents behind such grassroot level innovations need to be encouraged and recognized. Valuable ideas and techniques generated by them largely go unnoticed owing to lack of proper documentation and opportunities for wider dissemination. An initial and pioneering attempt in this direction has been made by the Division of Agricultural Extension, ICAR, to document such innovations developed across the country in the form of this publication “Farm Innovators – 2010” for the benefit of various stakeholders.

The innovations includes improved varieties of food crops, innovative practices of improving crop production, fight pest attack etc. Details of such farm innovations are given in the attached “Farm Innovators-2010.pdf”.